Making The Grade: Smart A mixes teaching with testing at Grouting Fundamentals field day

For the third year in a row Atlas Copco has contributed to the Colorado School of Mines Grouting Fundamentals and Current Practice field day. As part of the week-long class, students are presented with practical demonstrations of strategies, techniques and equipment.

More than 80 students attended this year’s course, which Colorado School of Mines has offered annually since 1979 except for the year 2001. Enrolees represented private contracting firms from the U.S. and Puerto Rico, as well as government agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. They also came from several countries from South America and Europe.

This year’s field day was hosted by Baski Inc., Englewood, CO. Demonstrations included micropile push and pull testing, admixture presentations, and a low-mobility compaction grouting application used on one of the company’s concrete storage slabs, as well as the school’s annual sand column permeation testing.
Intelligent grout plant
Atlas Copco donated use of a new Unigrout Smart A grout plant and a three-person presentation team. The plant was used to provide uniformly mixed grout to the exact specifications required for a Bureau of Reclamation sand column permeability test. The test was created to evaluate penetration performance of various grout brands by ratio and admixture content, comparing permeation differences resulting from such things as changes in grout thickness and the addition of plasticizers.

Business Development Manager of Atlas Copco Geotechnical Drilling and Exploration Bill Warfield delivered a brief presentation on the Unigrout Smart A as Ken McClanahan operated the system to mix and pump the grout for the sand column test.

Brian Iske of De Neef Construction Chemicals, who donated some of the materials used in the field experience, said that the Unigrout Smart A is exactly the kind of plant needed for his products. A colloidal mixer, Iske said, is the best way to ensure that every particle is completely and uniformly wetted during mixing for correct consistency.

How This Smart System Works

Unigrout Smart A intelligent grouting system comes in two versions, Dosac Lite and Dosac Full.
Dosac Full can store up to 99 grouting mix programs, enabling a pre-programmed batch to be called up on demand. Dosac Lite stores only one program, precisely repeating the water-cement ratio and mixing time batch after batch, for as long as water and grout are available.